What Are Old Friends For?

People used to tell jokes. In my parents circle, jokes were part of the common language and were shared like gossip and recipes on the phone, over cake and coffee, at the grocery store. My favorite story of theirs was actually a meta joke that referred to a group much like themselves who assigned a number to each of their gags. If they were sitting around someone’s living room guzzling cocktails and eating peanuts, all someone had to say was “42” and everyone would dissolve into hysterics. “16” was a real riot.

Those are the kind of friends they had and the kind I had back in the Berkshires. The kind that were there year after year, turkey after turkey, until they weren’t. The connections went so deep that there was almost unlimited room for error. If someone said something offensive to me, I would bitch and moan about it, but ultimately let it go because the stakes were so high. I couldn’t afford to intentionally cut anyone off, especially later in life when I was losing them whether I wanted to or not. I’m guessing they felt the same way about me.

Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

I don’t think my parents made new friends late in life. Certainly not my father who was always a tag along among my mother’s mah jong and canasta-playing associates. He had his greatest moments on the carpet with small children, making goofy faces and doing card tricks. It’s funny how I never wondered what they were thinking in secret during those social events played out in clouds of perfume and cigar smoke. Maybe my mother was wondering how my Aunt Ella could stand herself with her mink coat and her apartment in the Apthorp. Maybe my father was wishing my Uncle Jerry,  my mother’s brother and always her favorite, would have one scotch too many and pass out. Daddy, or course, couldn’t know that when he died Jerry, not famous for sentimentality, would weep like a baby on the sidewalk in front of the funeral parlor. There were issues hidden like Crackerjack prizes under their sugary affections. But they were dependable and they were a package deal. They bought blocks of tickets for Broadway shows. The women went to my father’s antique store when they needed to replace a chipped dinner plate in their service for twelve. A month later, he would be eating off that plate.

I’m thinking about the old friends I left behind in the Berkshires where I lived for fifty years. Some date from the beginning when I came back from two years in Sweden and decided not to return to New York. A few were people I even knew in the city who made the great pilgrimage north at about the same time, relocating to a place beyond fire escapes and police sirens.  We arrived with our native distrust and urban bravado. But we soon discovered there was much to learn.  I had no idea that one way to scare a woodchuck or a rabbit was to leave a transistor radio playing in the middle of your vegetable garden. I didn’t know that if you wanted to do something on your property, you had to suck up to specific individuals on the zoning board. My old friends with their outer borough accents and their children who I’ve known since they were born are leaving me now, each in her own time. For those who remain, our history is dense with private jokes and references that only we understand. There’s a sweet and sour longing in my bloodstream when I think about them. Still, it occurs to me as I look for connections to people in Minnesota that I met more or less yesterday that old friends are distinguished by more than an accretion of memories. These people have seen me in the raw, stripped of my costume, my social mask. They’ve witnessed my jealousy, my pettiness, my overweening sense of self-importance and they still invited me for dinner. 

I come to new friends behind a veil, a facade. We haven’t known one another long enough to be crabby, impatient. I wonder if there will be time for that. I hope so, because if not all of the unenlightened parts of myself will belong to my immediate family and that doesn’t seem fair. I want to be able to share all of who I am with the people I care about. New friends sometimes provide an opportunity for me to exercise my capacity for generosity. A woman in the building who had taken a bad fall a few days before asked me to go with her back to urgent care to have the stitches on her forehead removed. I was glad to be asked. I was glad to do it. But what if I had refused? Would there have been an opportunity for forgiveness, for reconciliation? Forgiveness takes years to flower. With new friends, the garden is mulched and manicured. The weeds come later.

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